The Worst Airports in the World A New Perspective

Beijing

The worst airport is the one I have to use most often: Beijing Capital International Airport. Although generally very efficient, it is blighted with nervous ticks and quirks as to make it both lovable and infuriating at the same time. The introduction of Norman Foster's new terminal in time for the Olympic Games will most likely change air travel in the Chinese capital completely. It has had some minor cosmetic changes in recent years, but it remains a throwback to the days of central planning and socialist realism.

Paris/CDG

 
I nominate Charles de Gaulle airport, Paris. The old part is a cramped and crumbling concrete doughnut with no windows; and the new part, or second terminal, is actually six terminals, scattered and difficult to find your way around. Part of it fell down in 2004, killing five people.

Heathrow

 
The former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd once described Heathrow as a " camp" – and he was getting the full VIP treatment every time he passed through. The very word conjures images that are almost wholly negative: the foreigner-baffling approach to Terminal Four, which always feels like a temporary diversion, but isn't; the massive, shuffling queue of arrivals at passport control on, say, a Saturday evening, calculated to dissipate any surge of homecoming euphoria; the mournful stocks of hairspray and aftershave discarded at departures; the breathtaking costs incurred by anyone ignorant enough to take a taxi into the city, and – more personally – the peculiar humiliation of being forced, on a bleak winter's morning after a sleepless 20-hour flight from the Far East, to pay in duty half the cost of a Hong Kong-made suit that falls apart two days later.